10 Platforms Where You Can Host Online Courses

Have you thought about creating an online course for your blog?

Blogging is big business. Companies with successful blogs generate 67% more leads than those that do not have one. With 3.42 billion internet users across the globe, you have to take it seriously.

In my post, 7 Trends Bloggers Can’t Afford To Ignore, I spoke about the importance of having something to sell on your blog. Once you’ve enticed somebody to visit your home site, you need to make a living from what you do.

You can sell advertising if you have a great website. You can sell your expertise by promoting your own products. These include digital products like e-books, e-courses, and online coaching sessions. You can also sell products like in-person seminars and courses, speaking engagements, and gifts with your logo.

E-Learning in numbers

In 2015, the e-learning market size was valued at over $165 billion. It is projected to grow to 240 billion by 2023. (source)

If you think you’re ready to promote a course, you can create one on your own website, or you can use one of the many excellent blogging platforms that will host your course.

Here are 10 online course platforms for you to consider:

LearnWorlds allows you to sell, market and create your courses in one place. Once the course is set up on this user-friendly platform , owners can personalise their domains. You do not need any design or development skills. It has advanced analytics, great sales pages, an intelligent sales engine, and you can customise your front-end.

Educadium lets you try out the online hosting service for free so you can decide if it’s suitable for your business or not. They say: ‘Our mission is to help individuals and organisations of all sizes create, manage, and profit from online teaching and training through easy-to-use and affordable learning management tools.’

CourseCraft helps you create e-courses and turn your blog into an actual business. This all-in-one platform means that you avoid paying for a domain, plugins, storage and a shopping cart. You can get right down to making your course. It offers an intuitive dashboard, custom branding, and statistics.

Ruzuku is a user-friendly website that helps you with everything from designing a course and getting it online to marketing it. If you’re looking for a way to engage with your students, and if you need something reasonable, they suggest you try them. It includes features, like MailChimp and PayPal integrations. They say: ‘We make it ridiculously easy to teach online.’

Teachable has a formula for creating courses in five steps. The platform has about 20 000 active courses online. The site also offers a free ebook about course creation, preparing content for videos, slides and much more.

The Udemy platform helps you create a coherent, professional course with PowerPoint slides, PDF documents, and YouTube videos. Udemy makes it’s money by keeping 50% if it sells your course. If you sell the course, you keep 97% (Udemy gets a 3% transaction fee). It has more than 17 million students and 27 000 instructors. It also offer courses in 80 languages. It is also suitable for corporate training.

With Thinkific, you control your site design, content, course pricing, and student information. It has a user-friendly format that is optimised for every platform and device for users across the globe. Thinkific includes payment solutions to accept credit cards, handle student registrations, and all aspects of course delivery. The platforms hosts more than 35 000 course creators.

Zippy Courses was originally a WordPress plug-in. It is now a standalone platform. It is one piece of software that is optimised for creating, selling, and running your online course. You have to request an invite to get started. Pricing starts at $99 per month with no transaction fees.

The company provides a platform for offering live Webinar sessions – with slides, desktop sharing, audio, and video – that can also be recorded for on-demand access by learners. WizIQ is perfect for universities, teachers, and tutors. You can choose between two different modules: a virtual classroom or the online academy. You can sell your courses in WizIQ’s online marketplace. Pricing starts at $230 per year.

OpenSesame is an online content provider that resells courses provided by third-party companies. If your course is published here, any learning management system (LMS) can access it. If you know other people who want your content on their own LMS, this is a good platform for you. The company takes 40% of any sales you make.